How To Save A Life
by Kanadajin
Summary: After a successful mission resulting in a new ZPM, Rodney follow's Sheppards advice and all heck breaks loose. No fluff, slash, or nonsence.


**Stargate Atlantis:**  
_How To Save A Life_

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Disclaimer: SGA doesn't belong to me. sigh.

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_Step one you say we need to talk  
He walks you say sit down it's just a talk  
He smiles politely back at you  
You stare politely right on through  
Some sort of window to your right  
As he goes left and you stay right  
Between the lines of fear and blame  
And you begin to wonder why you came _

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend  
Somewhere along in the bitterness  
And I would have stayed up with you all night  
Had I known how to save a life

Rodney McKay, scientific head of the Atlantis expedition and self proclaimed smartest living human strutted down the hall, and oh yes, it was a strut. He had just found a ZPM, and was on his victory march with it up to the control room to show it off to Weir. Oh yes, she was impressed. If he hadn't have been in such a tizzy to plug in said ZPM and see what new and wonderful things they could do with the extra power, he would have asked her out. Well, no, not really. But he might have noticed the strange readings coming from the Ancient device that they found along with the ZPM.

"Now Rodney, are you sure you've got it in right side up? You were pissing around with the innards of your radio last week when you had the batteries in the wrong way." Sheppard said in a somewhat condescending voice to the frustrated scientist.

"No, Colonel," Rodney shot back in a scathing tone, as though using the man's military rank to indicate a gap in intelligence, "the ZPM is not upside down - there isn't any way to get the two ends mixed up."

"Well have you tried giving it a wiggle?"

Rodney threw down the electronic gizmo he was working with and threw his hands up in the air. "Would you... gahh!!!" Stuttering for words he shook his finger at Sheppard, "you aren't helping!"

Sheppard smirked and backed off.

"Thank you," Rodney said irritably, then reached out and wiggled the ZPM. He ignored Sheppard's chuckle as the lights seemed to flicker as power surged out of the ZPM into the generators. "Holy... it worked!"

Rodney turned with that wonderful smile of his that one only saw when the man had made something miraculous happening without trying... and when he wasn't expecting it to happen. John opened his mouth to haze Rodney about wiggling the ZPM, but instead he belatedly attempted to shout a warning. McKay's eyes widened and the smile faded from his face as a halo of blue electric current wrapped around him and the ZPM that he still had his hand on.

"Cut the power, cut the power," John yelled at the two other scientists in the room. They looked at him terrified as electricity cracked and sparked around them, lancing across the metal room. Oh shit, I'm in a giant metal conductor with a colossal power source, was his last thought before he blacked out. Well, actually, the very last thing to run through his mind was the sudden urge for a turkey sandwich, but the former of the two sounds much more heroic than the latter.

* * *

John awoke in the med bay, not an unfamiliar occurrence, and found Elizabeth standing over him with a worried look on her face. Again, not an unfamiliar sight. "Hey... why am I in here?" 

The worried look only increased, "you don't remember?"

Blinking heavily he drew himself up onto his elbows and scanned his memory. "Uhm... I was in the ZPM room with Rodney, Portschev and that cute Chinese girl. McKay was having a hard time getting the ZPM to power up and I told him to..." John sat straight up and looked frantically around the sickbay. "Where's McKay?!?!"

A hand pressed his shoulder down and he looked over at Beckett. "He's in the ICU, but he's stable. Calm down or you're going to make yourself worse."

Sheppard sighed and let himself be pushed back down into the pillows. "What the hell happened?"

"From what we can tell," Elizabeth sat down in the chair by his bed, "Rodney somehow caused the ZPM to build up a charge on its surface, and when he touched it... well, you saw what happened."

Sheppard groaned and clenched his fists in anger. "Dammit, I told him to try wiggling it. He wouldn't have touched it if I hadn't had to go saying that."

"John," Elizabeth said in her best school teacher's voice, "you had no idea that this would happen, and even so, Zelenka has said that this would have happened eventually when someone tried to remove it, that or the charge would have built up so much that it would have caused a near catastrophic explosion."

"Is he..." John grimaced remembering seeing Rodney's back arching in pain through the blue halo around him, mouth open in an eerily silent scream. "Is he going to be okay?"

Elizabeth nodded and he sighed in relief. "He was burnt fairly bad, but it seems he's going to recover fine from them... however his higher functions..." She didn't want to have to say the rest, but the demanding look in John's eyes couldn't keep her silent. "He's in a coma and Carson says that there is the possibility of brain damage."

John's eyes closed and Elizabeth could feel the strong emotions radiating from her military commander as though they were flavours she could taste. His fists trembled, white knuckled, as he gripped the blue bed sheet. "How bad?"

She shook her head. "We won't know until he wakes up."

* * *

Carson moved away and slipped between the divider curtains to check on Portschev. The man received terrible burns when he tried to tackle McKay, to get him away from the ZPM. He managed to knock Rodney loose, but both were still hit hard by the stray volts. He opened the door that lead him into the heavily sterilized room the Ukrainian was lying in.

He was far worse off than Rodney. The current had burned over 90 of his body, his heart stopped for several minutes before they'd been able to get it started again, and the most grisly of all... his eyes had completely popped. When the power had shut off and the medical team was able to get into the room, more than a few lunches were lost. The man was like a burned rag doll, when they tried to pick him up exposed skin stuck to the floor and peeled off in chunks like a well roast turkey. More lunches lost.

Delicately Carson touched the man's shoulder, one of the few places that wasn't completely covered in bandages. "Vasil?" As he expected there was no movement or any indication that the man heard him. Carson checked his watch. The Daedelus was due to arrive in a few hours, which was very lucky for them. The best thing for a burn victim is to not have anything touching their skin during the healing process. Right now he was covered in bandages and lying on a bed, weightlessness would make everything much better. He had argued for waiting on the Daedelus rather than sending Rodney and Portschev through the gate for treatment on Earth on the basis that once they were stabilized, the weeks long journey to Earth in weightlessness would be far better for them than anything else found in the military's hospitals.

Marking something down on his chart, the Scotsman next turned to the room adjacent. Inside McKay lay in his own protective cocoon of bandages and monitors. It was a miracle that he wasn't as badly burned as Portschev, let alone alive. Carson couldn't understand it. When they'd entered the room, after the initial fears concerning Portschev, Rodney looked like he'd hardly been touched by the ZPM's destructive force. Until they rolled him over and found his left hand burnt into a claw, they didn't think he'd been hurt at all. Unfortunately in their haste to get Vasil taken care of, the others were slightly neglected and if it hadn't been for a marine lying in the bed next to Rodney they wouldn't have caught him as he went into convulsions and his heart stopped.

It seemed the electric charge of the ZPM had muddled around with his brain. Tested showed that it was firing in a completely random pattern, and they had to have someone with him constantly after his heart stopped beating several times. Carson was still unsure if he had made the correct decision for Rodney when he refused to send him through the gate straight away, and looking at the monitors surrounding the man now, he beat down the urge to call for a gurney and take the man through the gate asap.

Moving to Rodney's bedside he sat in the chair closest to his unburnt hand and placed his atop it. "Rodney? Can ya hear me?"

Again, no response, though there was a flicker on his brain monitor indicating the possibility that he'd been heard. Carson smiled and leaned back in his chair. "Well now, mister smarty pants, I know you can hear me so now's my chance to get a few words in edgewise."

Halfway into his rant concerning the advances of medicine in the past thirty years Rodney's finger twitched. And not in the usual 'twitchy' way that someone moves while in a coma. It was clearly the middle finger rising up a half inch above the other fingers and aiming itself at Carson.

With a cheery grin plastered across his face, Carson stood up and patted Rodney's hand. "That'll do, Rodney. That'll do."

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OOC: I just had to write this after watching an episode of Traders on CBC the other night. 


End file.
